After seeing the Ravens gritty win tonight, if we both end up making the Super Bowl, does anybody else besides me think that the Ray Lewis retirement party/last game ever will be more intolerable than Jerome Bettis coming "home" to Detroit for Super Bowl XL?

I don't think the media liked Bettis nearly as much as they like Ray Lewis. But there is no "homecoming" story and people in general don't believe Ray Lewis is really retiring. He even kind of backed off of it a day later to some. So... I think it's way different circumstances.

I think a much bigger story would have been Super-Peyton's miraculous recovery and the parallels between that and his home town of New Orleans recovery. I am so damned glad Denver is out. I know the media had Peyton/Katrina parallel pieces already made. D-bags.

Sharkhawk - I agree with you also. The whole game I was like...blah, if Ray Lewis gets to the Super Bowl, it will be intolerable...then 2 seconds later I was bound and determined that having the Payton Manning comeback story would be worse...I spent the whole game waffling!

The good thing is that it wasn't the AFC Championship, so it isn't a huge worry now. Of course... I think we have to worry about the Hawks winning, but even if they don't, I wouldn't have been able to stomach a Broncos superbowl. I can stand the Ravens because Paul Kruger was my neighbor as he grew up and he was the star QB at the high school a block from my house (that we just moved out of after many years). Paul is an amazing kid. Really hard worker (came back from his deathbed after being attacked and stabbed dozens of times), and just a real inspiration. My son attended the preschool that they have at Paul's high school and the Kruger kids were always awesome to the "Wee Wolves" so I can vote for him. Haloti Ngata is also from here and when I get free time I go and volunteer up in the schools he attended as a kid (west side of Salt Lake). To top it all off... Dennis Pitta is a BYU kid and really is one of the coolest, most down to earth people you'll meet in your entire life. He was a great player at BYU that got the Bruce Irvin/Russell Wilson treatment at draft time (they said he wasn't physical enough to play TE). He has only gone out and been one of the best TE's in football. So yeah... I can get behind that team, even with the Ray Lewis stupidity. At least they have 3 really cool guys on their team, and two (Kruger and Ngata) are kids that I've followed since they were about age 12 (literally... I saw them at a BYU camp in junior high... Paul was going to be THE next great BYU QB and ended up playing DE at Utah!).

Ray Lewis has that same Jerome Bettis baby-kissing phoney vibe for me, especially after I saw him in court. He just irked me. He seemed so creepy in that whole situation. Like he didn't even care and whatever, let me get back to my rich millionaire life and stop wasting my time. Who cares if two men are dead... I've got a nice suit dammit.

The difference is that Ray Lewis is actually a good player and a quality contributor to his team, not a washed-up compiler who is maybe the 50th most important player to his team's success. Lewis would be a much more legitimate storyline.

Rat wrote:The difference is that Ray Lewis is actually a good player and a quality contributor to his team, not a washed-up compiler who is maybe the 50th most important player to his team's success. Lewis would be a much more legitimate storyline.

I can understand where Steve2222 is coming from a bit, however, I think this years Hawks are good enough to overcome things like that. I'm just not looking forward to the drooling of the media over whoever we end up playing.

MissoulaHawkFan wrote:After seeing the Ravens gritty win tonight, if we both end up making the Super Bowl, does anybody else besides me think that the Ray Lewis retirement party/last game ever will be more intolerable than Jerome Bettis coming "home" to Detroit for Super Bowl XL?

Ray Lewis has a ring though.. so kind of different circumstance.

I honestly feared playing Denver in the SB because Peyton's ties to New Orleans.